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I was doing that [a collaboration with Kurt Cobain] to try to save his life. The collaboration was me calling up as an excuse to reach out to this guy. He was in a really bad place.

Michael Stipe

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Michael Stipe
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: January 4
Actor
Composer
Film Producer
Guitarist
Musician
Peace Activist
Record Producer
Restaurateur
Singer
Singer-Songwriter
Television Actor
Decatur
Georgia
John Michael Stipe
JMS
Stinky
Calling
Save
Reach
Guy
Place
Trying
Kurt
Really
Collaboration
Life
Excuse

More quotes by Michael Stipe

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You don't need to be talented. You don't even have to play the guitar to be a guitar player in a punk-rock band. So I, in a very naïve and teenage way, said, That's it. I'm going to be in a band.
Michael Stipe
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Peter was sick of being a pop star, the guitar god, and so he decided to teach himself other instruments. Among the instruments that he picked up was the mandolin.
Michael Stipe
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The whole punk ethic was do-it-yourself, and I've always been very literal, especially as a kid. When they said that anybody can do this, I was like, 'OK, that's me.'
Michael Stipe
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And I don't expect anyone can bring about a revolution in the way that Bob Dylan did - and really didn't - in the 1960s.
Michael Stipe
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Anything you do as a group is fraught with compromise... But everyone 's got to do that, right? It's part of being a good parent, or a good boyfriend, whatever.
Michael Stipe
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The song Sing for the Submarine presents my dream world, which is way different from my waking world. It's set in the future and it's post-apocalyptic.
Michael Stipe
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I was a teenager, we were pretty much fully indoctrinated, thanks to sexual scare tactics. I remember so many public-health commercials with a B-actor in a fake alley background warning us to use protection or telling us the only real safe choice was abstinence. We were highly frightened of sex from day one. There was no free-swinging '90s.
Michael Stipe
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There tend to be two different drives that lead young people toward music. One is that music provides an escape it takes you away from the unhappiness or torture of where you are and makes you feel less alienated-you believe there is a place you fit in somewhere else. The other is a sort of transcendent, spiritual feeling in the purity of music.
Michael Stipe
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So, when you divide the world into music lovers, music fans and then those people who are just very casual about their music, it's wallpaper to them, it's elevator music, it's just the thing that's playing in the background that helps them through their day.
Michael Stipe
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Sometimes before we make a record I go back and listen to a few. It's equally humbling and uplifting.
Michael Stipe
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I'm tired of being this solemn poet of the masses, the enigma shrouded in a mystery.
Michael Stipe
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I came to New York for the first time with Peter Buck at age 19. We spent a week living out of a van on the street in front of a club in the West 60s called Hurrah. It's where Pylon played. I saw Klaus Nomi play there. And Michael Gira's band before he did Swans-they all wore cowboy boots and were so cool and had great hair. I was so jealous.
Michael Stipe
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I remember traffic jams Motor boys and girls with tans Nearly was and almost rans I remember this, this ... At the edge of the continent
Michael Stipe
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For me, as a music fan, visuals kind of steal away the purity of the song. My instinct is not to provide a visual to go with a piece of music. But here's MTV. It's really powerful.
Michael Stipe
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It was '86. We were a big enough name and we had enough cache that MTV wanted to play us, so, along with Michael Jackson and Madonna, they played our upside-down, black-and-white, backward, single unedited footage of a rock quarry with orange letters over the top of it and called it art.
Michael Stipe
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Sometimes I'm confused by what I think is really obvious. But what I think is really obvious obviously isn't obvious.
Michael Stipe
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To be called an elder statesman is so unbelievably insulting. Brad Pitt is exactly three years younger than me.
Michael Stipe
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The artwork for the record is kind of an homage to that. It's a collage, which rhymes with homage, I just realized. It's an homage to this kind of almost like a teenager's idea of what the future might look like, if he were using a Xerox machine and cut-and-pasting it together. Which is exactly what we did to come up with the artwork.
Michael Stipe
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[Columbia House] magazines were how I found out about the punk world going on in New York. Because of what I read, at the age of 15, I hounded the local record store to order a copy of Horses [1975] for me by Patti Smith.
Michael Stipe
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They always want me to play myself and that's a big snooze.
Michael Stipe